Terror leader becomes first to be charged over Benghazi attack – just hours before CNN is to air first-ever interview with him

Militants affiliated with Ansar al-Sharia laid waste to the U.S. Consulate compound in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, killing four Americans including the ambassador

U.S. government officials have reportedly filed the first criminal charges related to the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya that left four Americans dead and a diplomatic outpost in ruins.

Arwa Damon, a CNN reporter, spoke with Ansar al-Sharia leader Ahmed Abu Khattala in an interview to be broadcast Tuesday night. The network first reported on the criminal charges against him a few hours before airtime.

The U.S. government has not yet spoken with Khattala, but CNN found him in Benghazi, the eastern LIbyan port city where militant members of his al-Qaeda-linked group lobbed mortars and gunfire at the consulate compound, killing U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others.

'It's still stunning to see how little protection this sprawling compound had,' Damon says in the preview footage, walking through the burned-out remains of the U.S. Consulate.

CNN released a few short video clips Tuesday afternoon, but neither included portions of the Khattala interview, which the network said would not include any footage of the suspected terror ringleader's face.

He told CNN, however, that while he was present in the U.S. Consulate compound when
hostilities began, he played no part in it.

Khattala said in the interview that no Libyan or American officials have reached out to him.

'Never,' he said.

'Even the investigative team did not try to contact me, he said, referring to the FBI.

OutFront host Erin Burnett also interviewed Geoff Porter, director of North Africa Risk Consulting Inc. Porter was responsible for briefing Ambassador Stevens on security risks, according to CNN, and spoke about why security at the diplomatic outpost was so sparse.

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Khattala told CNN that the FBI has never tried to contact him, and insisted that while he was present at the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi he had nothing to do with the attack

CNN's Arwa Damon toured the rubble of the U.S. Consulate and interviewed Ahmed Abu Khattala, the militant suspected of spearheading the Benghazi attack

The CNN broadcast will also include interviews with family members of Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty (pictured), and Sean Smith and U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens, all of whom died in the terror attack last year

'What we're essentially talking about
is a CIA mission in Benghazi, whose purpose was to collect information,
to collect weapons potentially,' Porter says, 'and they may have
deliberately wanted to keep a low security profile.'

'There
were so many different violent non-state actors - armed groups - that
the U.S. couldn't identify the threat. They couldn't distinguish which
was a group threatening the United States' interests, and which was
simply a violent non-state actor pursuing its own agenda.

At least two other media outlets interviewed Ahmed Abu Khattala in October 2012.

Geoff Porter, who was responsible for briefing Ambassador Chris Stevens on security risks, said the CIA was responsible for setting the security agenda, and likely wanted to keep a low profile

At the time, he scoffed at reports that said 'no one knows where I am and that I am hiding.'

'But here I am in the open,' he told Reuters, 'sitting in a hotel with you. I'm even going to pick up my sister's kids from school soon.'

He also told The New York Times a story that resonated with the Obama administration's earliest contentions about the terror attack.

Khattala
'contended that the attack had grown out of a peaceful protest against a
video made in the United States that mocked the Prophet Muhammad and
Islam,' the Times reported.

'He
also said that guards inside the compound — Libyan or American, he was
not sure — had shot first at the demonstrators, provoking them.'

Khattala was a member of the Islamist opposition when Muammar Gaddaffi was alive, and spent years in the country's notorious Abu Salim jail. After his release in 2011, he helped the rebels capture and kill the longtime dictator.

Ansar al-Sharia, his brainchild along with other former political prisoners, means 'supporters of Islamic law.' At the time of the attack, Libyan sources said the group numbered between 100 and 200 people.

Damon’s reporting has brought outrage from eight congressional Republicans, who castigated the newly confirmed FBI Director James Comey in a letter and demanded a full investigative briefing within 30 days.

Khattala was a longtime opposition leader of the Libyan resistance movement seeking to topple the murderous strongman Muammar Gaddafi, and founded Ansar al-Sharia after his release from political imprisonment

President Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have struggled to explain how the American investigation into the Benghazi attack has produced so few results

The Obama administration’s investigation of the attack, they wrote, has been 'simply unacceptable.'

'It
has been more than 10 months since the attacks,' the letter reads. 'We
appear to be no closer to knowing who was responsible today than we were
in the early weeks following the attack.'

Utah Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz, a vocal proponent of a more aggressive Benghazi administration, told reporters on July 31 that “one of the pertinent questions today is, why we have not captured or killed the terrorists who committed these attacks?'

If 'CNN was able to go in and talk to one of the suspected terrorists,' he asked, after news of the Ahmed Abu Khattala interview percolated throughout Washington, 'how come the military hasn’t been able to get after them and capture or kill the people? How come the FBI isn’t doing this and yet CNN is?'

He added that he would be willing to
speak with investigators, 'but not as an interrogation, as a
conversation like the one we are having right now.'

Chaffetz said during a July 31 Fox News
broadcast that the FBI hasn't placed a high priority on bringing to
justice the attackers who are connected with the Ansar al-Sharia.

'Our FBI has never talked to these people,' Chaffetz said, 'and that's just wholly unacceptable.'

During the 10:00 pm EDT 'The Truth about Benghazi' CNN broadcast, OutFront host Erin Burnett will also interview family
members of Tyrone Woods, Glen Doherty, Sean Smith and U.S. Ambassador to
Libya Chris Stevens, all of whom died in the terror attack last year.

Chris Stevens, then the U.S. Ambassador to Libya, was killed in the Sept. 11, 2012 terror attack